AMERICAN HISTORICAL' ASSOCIATION. 



HISTORY; 



AUGURAL ADDRESS. 



JAMES FORD RHODES, 



PRESIDENT. 



(From the AddhbI l!.|»«>rt of tbe American Hisioritiil Association for 1899, 
Vol. I, pagan 43-68.) 



WASHINGTON: 

\ KKNJMENT PRINTING OFFICE. 

L9 00. 



FEB 3 1903 
D.ofD, 






II —INAUGURAL ADDRESS OF JAMES FORD RHODES, PRESIDENT OF 

THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION, AT FIFTEENTH 

ANNUAL MEETING, DECEMBER 28, 1899. 



43 



HISTORY. 



BvJAmes Fokd Rhodes, President American Historical Association. 



A minor from a far Western town describes Boston as "a 
city in whose streets respectability stalked about unchecked." 
Here was a high compliment. To be respectable is to be 
worthy of esteem, and I think if one were to set down seri- 
ously the qualities which entitle Boston to honor, not the least 
of them would be the high moral standard that prevails here 
among men. This is worthy of mention to members of an 
association which stands, above all, for honesty and truth. 
It is impossible to attend these meetings without gaining the 
impression that, however else we differ, we are at one in our 
endeavor to elicit the truth; that we are readj^, by precept 
and example, to traverse the definition attributed to Napo- 
leon, that history is lies agreed upon. I have thought, then, 
that no theme better suited to the company and the occasion 
could be chosen than simply ' 'history. " 

It is an old subject, which has been discoursed about since 
Herodotus, and one would be vain indeed who flattered him- 
self he could say aught new concerning the methods of writ- 
ing it, when this subject has for so long a period engaged the 
minds of so many gifted men. Yet, to a sympathetic audi- 
ence, to a people who love history, there is always the chance 
that a fresh treatment may present the commonplaces in some 
different combination, and augment for the moment an inter- 
est which is perennial. 

Holding a brief for history as do I, your representative, let 
me at once concede that it is not the highest form of intel- 
lectual endeavor; let us at once agree that it were better that 
all the histories ever written were burned than for the world 
to lose Homer and Shakespeare. Yet, as it is generally true 
that an advocate rarely admits anything without qualification, 

45 



46 AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 

I should not be loyal to my client did I not urge that Shakes- 
peare was historian as well as poet. We all prefer his Antony 
and Cleopatra and Julius Csesar to the Lives in North's 
Plutarch which furnished him his materials. The history is 
in substance as true as Plutarch, the dramatic force greater, 
the language is better than that of Sir Thomas North, who 
himself did a remarkable piece of work when he gave his coun- 
try a classic by Englishing a French version of the Stories of 
the Greek. It is true, as Macaulay wrote, the historical 
plays of Shakespeare have superseded history. When we 
think of Henry V it is of Prince Hal, the boon companion of 
Falstaff, who spent his youth in brawl and riot, and then 
became a sober and duty -loving king; and our idea of Rich- 
ard III is a deceitful, dissembling, cruel wretch who knew 
no touch of pity, a bloody tyrant who knew no law of God or 
man. 

The Achilles of Homer was a very living personage to 
Alexander. How happy he was, said the great general when 
he visited Troy, " in having while he lived so faithful a friend, 
and when he was dead so famous a poet to proclaim his 
actions." In our century, as more in consonance with society 
under the regime of contract, when force has largely given way 
to craft, we feel in greater sympathy with Ulysses. " The one 
person I would like to have met and talked with," Froude used 
to say, "was Ulysses. How interesting it would be to have 
his opinion on universal suffrage, and on a house of parlia- 
ment where Thersites is listened to as patiently as the king of 
men." 

We may also concede that in the realm of intellectual 
endeavor the mathematical and physical sciences should have 
the precedence of history. The present is more important 
than the past, and those sciences which contribute to our com- 
fort place within the reach of the laborer and mechanic as 
common necessaries what w T ould have been the highest luxury 
to the Roman emperor or to the king of the Middle Ages, con- 
tribute to health and the preservation of life, and by the 
development of railroads make possible such a gathering as 
this. These sciences, we cheerfully admit, outrank our modest 
enterprise, which, in the words of Herodotus, is "to preserve 
from decay the remembrance of what men have done." It 
may be true, as a geologist once said in extolling his study 



HISTORY. 47 

at the expense of the humanities, " Elockq do not Lie, although 
men do," yet, on the other hand, the historic sense, which 
during our century has diffused itself widely, has invaded the 
domain of physical science. If you are unfortunate enough 
to he ill and consult a doctor he expatiates on the history of 
3'our disease. It was once my duty to attend the commence* 
ment exercises of a technical school, when one of the grad- 
uates had a thesis on bridges. He began by telling how they 
were built in Julius Caesar's time, and tracing at some length 
the development of the art during the period of the material 
prosperity of the Roman Empire, he had little time and space 
left to consider their construction at the present day. One of 
the most brilliant surgeons I ever knew — the originator of a 
number of important surgical methods, who, being a physi- 
cian as well, was remarkable in his expedients in saving life 
when called in counsel in grave and apparently hopeless cases — 
desired to write a book embodying his discoveries and devices, 
but said that the feeling was strong within him that he must 
begin his work with an account of medicine in Egypt and 
trace its development down to our own time; as he was a busy 
man in his profession, he lacked the leisure to make the pre- 
liminary historical study and his book was never written. 
Men of affairs who, taking " the present time by the top," are 
looked upon as devoted to the physical and mechanical sciences, 
continually pa}>" tribute to our art. President Garfield, on his 
deathbed, asked one of his most trusted Cabinet adv r isers, in 
words that become pathetic as one thinks of the opportunities 
destroyed by the assassin's bullet, " Shall I live in history?" 
A clever politician, who knew more of ward meetings, cau- 
cuses, and the machinery of conventions than he did of history 
books, and who was earnest for the renomination of President 
Arthur in 1884, said to me, in the way of clinching his argu- 
ment, " That Administration will live in history." So it was, 
according to Amyot, in the olden time. " Whensoever," he 
wrote, " the right sage and virtuous Emperor of Rome, Alex- 
ander Severus, was to consult of any matter of grave impor- 
tance, whether it concerned war or government, he always 
called such to counsel as were reported to be well skilled in 
histories." 

Proper concessions being made to poetry and the physical 
sciences, our place in the field remains secure. All of us here 



48 AMERICAN' HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 

will accept fully these temperate conclusions <»t' the commit- 
tee of Seven of this association, namely, "•Appreciation and 
sympathy for the present is best secured by a study of tin- 
past ;" the study of history is ;i training in the handling of 
books; it is a training in citizenship, in judgment, in char- 
acter. This committee have compassed their object and estab- 
lished their points. On their ground it is unnecessary to 
trench, and for me it would be presumptuous. My paper 
will take somewhat the form of a plea for general historians, 
and from their point of view will envisage the writing of his- 
tory. On the first day of our meeting we should maintain 
a closed front against the advocates of other studies, and it 
shall be my purpose to steer clear of mooted questions* J 
shall not discuss the propositions whether history is the 
"handmaid of philosophy" or whether it is "philosophy 
teaching by examples," nor shall I enter upon the relations 
between history and political science, and I shall aim to avoid 
definitions. I shall not go into disputed matters unless by 
the nature of the case 1 touch upon them by indirection, 
believing what Huxley wrote in his prologue to Some Contro- 
verted Questions, that " controversy always tends to degen- 
erate into quarreling, to swerve from the great issue of what 
is right and what is wrong to the very small question of who 
is right and who is wrong." 

Was there ever so propitious a time for w r riting history as 
in the last forty years? There has been a general acquisition 
of the historic sense. The methods of teaching history have 
so improved that thev may be called scientific. Even as the 
chemist and physicist, we talk of practice in the laboratory. 
Most biologists will accept Hoeckel's designation of " the last 
forty years as the age of Darwin," for the theory of evolution 
is firmly established. The publication of the Origin of Spe- 
cies in 1859 converted it from a poet's dream and philoso- 
pher's speculation to a well-demonstrated scientific theory. 
Evolution, heredity, environment, have become household 
words, and their application to history has influenced every- 
one who has had to trace the development of a people, the 
growth of an institution, or the establishment of a cause. 
Other scientific theories and methods have affected physical 
science as potently, but no one has entered so vitally into the 
study of man. What hitherto the eye of genius alone could 



HISTORY. 49 

perceive may become the common property of everyone who 
cares to read a dozen hooks. But with all of our advantages, 
do we write better history than was written before the year 
185!), which we may call the line of demarcation between the 
old and the new \ 1 f the English, ( rerman, and American his- 
torical scholars should vote as to who were the two best histo- 
rians, I have little doubt that Thucydides and Tacitus would 
have a pretty large majority. If they were asked to name a 
third choice, it would Undoubtedly lie between Herodotus and 
Gibbon. At the meeting of this association in Cleveland, 
when methods of historical teaching were under discussion, 
Herodotus and Thucydides, but no others, were mentioned as 
proper object lessons. What are the merits of Herodotus? 
Accuracy in details, as we understand it, was certainly not 
one of them. Neither does he sift critically his facts, but 
intimates that he will not make a positive decision in the case 
of conflicting - testimony. " For myself," he wrote, " my duty 
is to report all that is said, but I am not obliged to believe it 
all alike — a remark which ma}^ be understood to apply to my 
whole history." He had none of the wholesome skepticism 
which we deem necessary in the weighing of historical evi- 
dence; on the contrary, he is frequently accused of credulity. 
Nevertheless, Percy Gardner calls his narrative nobler than 
that of Thucydides, and Mahaffy terms it an " incomparable 
histoiT." "'The truth is," wrote Macaulay in his diary, when 
he was 49 years old, U I admire no historians much except 
Herodotus, Thucydides, and Tacitus." Sir M. E. Grant Duff 
devoted his presidential address of 1895, before the lioyal 
Historical Society, wholly to Herodotus, ending with the con- 
clusion, "The fame of Herodotus, which has a little waned, 
will surely wax again." Whereupon the London Times 
devoted a leader to the subject. " We are concerned," it said, 
" to hear, on authority so eminent, that one of the most 
delightful writers of antiquity has a little waned of late in 
favor with the world. If this indeed be the case, so much 
the worse for the world. * * * When Homer and Dante 
and Shakespeare are neglected, then will Herodotus cease to 
be read." 

There we have the secret of his hold upon the minds of men. 
"He knows how to tell a story," said Professor Hart, in the 
discussion previously referred to at Cleveland. He has "an 
hist 99, vol i 1 



50 AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 

epic unity of plan," writes Professor Jebb. Herodotus lias 
furnished delight to all generations, while Polybius, more 
accurate and painstaking, a Learned historian and a practical 
statesman, gathers dust on the shelf or is read as a penance. 
Nevertheless it may be demonstrated from the historical liter- 
ature of England of our century that literary style and great 
power of narration alone will not give a man a niche in the 
temple of history. Herodotus showed diligence and honesty, 
without which his other qualities would have failed to secure 
him the place he holds in the estimation of historical scholars. 
From Herodotus we naturally turn to Thucydides, who in 
the beginning charms historical students by his impression of 
the seriousness and dignity of his business. *• History/' he 
writes, "will be found profitable by those who desire an exact 
knowledge of the pastas a key to the future, which in all human 
probability will repeat or resemble the past. .My history is 
an everlasting possession, not a prize composition which is 
heard and forgotten." Diligence, accuracy, love of truth, and 
impartiality are merits commonly ascribed to Thucydides, and 
the internal evidence of the history bears out fully the general 
opinion. But there is. in my judgment, a tendency in the com- 
parative estimates to rate the Athenian too high for the p<»- 
session of these qualities, for certainly some modern writers 
have possessed all of these merits in an eminent degree. When 
Jowett wrote in the preface to his translation, ''Thucydides 
stands absolutely alone among- the historians not only of 
Hellas, but of the world, in his impartiality and love of truth," 
he was unaware that a son of his own university was writing 
the history of a momentous period of his own country in a 
manner to impugn the correctness of that statement. When 
the Jowett Thucydides appeared Samuel K. Gardiner had pub- 
lished eight of his volumes, but he had not reached the great 
civil war, and his reputation, which has since grown with a 
cumulative force, was not fully established, but I have now 
no hesitation in saying that the internal evidence demonstrates 
that in impartiality and love of truth Gardiner is the peer of 
Thucydides. From the point of view of external evidence 
the case is even stronger for Gardiner; he submits to a harder 
test. That he has been able to treat so stormy, so contro- 
verted, and so well-known a period as England of the seven- 
teenth century with hardly a question of his impartiality is 



HISTORY. 51 

a wonderful tribute. In fact, in an excellent review of bis 
work I have seen liiin criticised for being too impartial. On 
the other hand, Grote thinks that he has found Thucydides in 
error — in the long dialogue between the Athenian representa- 
tives and the Melians. "This dialogue.' 1 Grote writes, "•can 
hardly represent what actually passed, except as to a few gen- 
eral points which the historian has followed out into deductions 
and illustrations, thus dramatizing the given situation in a 
powerful and characteristic manner.'' Those very words 
might characterize Shakespeare's account of the assassination 
of Julius Caesar, his reproduction of the speeches of Brutus 
and Mark Antony. Compare the relation in Plutarch with 
the third act of the traged} r and see how, in his amplification 
of the story, Shakespeare has remained true to the essential 
facts of the time. Plutarch gives no account of the speeches 
of Brutus and Mark Antony, confining himself to an allusion to 
the one and a reference to the other, but Appian of Alexandria, 
in his history, has reported them. The speeches in Appian 
lack the force which they have in Shakespeare, nor do they 
seemingly fit into the situation as well. 

I have adverted to this criticism of Grote, not that I love 
Thucydides less, but that I love Shakespeare more. For my 
part, the historian's candid acknowledgment in the beginning 
has convinced me of the essential, not the literal, truth of his 
accounts of speeches and dialogues. ""As to the speeches, " 
wrote the Athenian, "which were made either before or dur- 
ing the war, it was hard for me, and for others who reported 
them to me, to recollect the exact words. I have therefore 
put into the mouth of each speaker the sentiments proper to 
the occasion, expressed as I thought he would be likely to 
express them, while at the same time I endeavored, as nearly 
as I could, to give the general purport of what was actually 
said." That is the very essence of candor. But be the histor- 
ian "as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, he shall not escape 
calumny." Mahaffy declares that, "although all modern 
historians quote Thucydides with more confidence than they 
would quote the gospels," the Athenian has exaggerated; he 
is one-sided, partial, misleading, dry, and surly. Other critics 
agree with Mahaffy that he has been unjust to Cleon and has 
screened Nicias from blame that was his due for defective 
generalship. 



52 AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 

We approach Tacitus with respect. We rise from reading 1 

his Annuls, his History, and Germany with reverence. We 
know that we have been in the society of a gentleman who had 
a high standard of morality and honor. We feel that our 
guide was a serious student, a solid thinker, and u man of the 
world; that he expressed his opinions and delivered his judge- 
ments with a remarkable freedom from prejudice. He draws 
us to him with sympathy. He sounds the same mournful note 
which we detect in Thucydides. Tacitus deplores the folly 
and dissoluteness of the rulers of his nation; he bewails the 
misfortunes of his countiy. The merits we ascribe to Thucy- 
dides — diligence, accuracy, love of truth, impartiality — are his. 
The desire to quote from Tacitus is Irresistible. "The more 
I meditate," he writes, "on the events of ancient and modern 
times the more I am struck with the capricious uncertainty 
which mocks the calculations of men in all their transactions." 
Again, "Possibly there is in all things a kind of cycle, and 
there may be moral revolutions just as there are changes of 
seasons." "Commonplaces," sneer the scientific historian. 
True enough, but they might not have been commonplaces if 
Tacitus had not uttered them and his works had not been read 
and reread until they have become a common possession of 
historical students. From a thinker who deemed the time 
"out of joint," as Tacitus obviously did, and who, had he not 
possessed great strength of mind and character, might have 
lapsed into a gloomy pessimism, what noble words are these: 

Thin I regard as history's highest function: To let no worthy action be 
uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror 
to evil words and deeds. 

The modesty of the Roman is fascinating. " Much of what 
I have related," he says, "and shall have to relate may per- 
haps, I am aware, seem petty trifles to record. * * * My 
labors are circumscribed and unproductive of renown to the 
author." How agreeable to place in contrast with this the 
prophecy of his friend, the younger Pliny, in a letter to 
the historian: 

1 augur, nor does my augury deceive me, that your histories will l>e 
immortal; hence all the more do I desire to find a place in them. 

To my mind, one of the most charming things in historical 
literature is the praise which one great historian bestows upon 
another. Gibbon speaks of "the discerning eye" and "mas- 



lirSTORY. 5S 

terly pencil of Tacitus — the first of historians who applied the 
science of philosophy to the study of tacts." " whose writings 
will instruct the last generations of mankind/'' He has pro- 
duced an immortal work, "every sentence of which is pregnant 
with the deepest observations and most lively images." I 
mention Gibbon, for it is more than a strong probability that 
in diligence, accuracy, and love of truth he is the equal of 
Tacitus. A common edition of the History of the Decline and 
Fall of the Roman Empire is that with notes by Dean Milman, 
Guizot, and Dr. Smith. Niebuhr, Villemain, and Sir James 
Mackintosh are each drawn upon for criticism. Did ever such 
a fierce light beat upon a history? With what keen relish do 
the annotators pounce upon mistakes or inaccuracies, and in 
that portion of the work which ends with the fall of the Western 
Empire how few do they find. Would Tacitus stand the 
supreme test better? There is, so far as I know, only one case 
in which we may compare his Annals with an original record. 
On bronze tablets found at Lyons in the sixteenth century is 
engraved the same speech made by the Emperor Claudius to 
the senate that Tacitus reports. "Tacitus and the tablets," 
writes Professor Jebb, "disagree hopelessly in language and 
in nearly all the detail, but agree in the general line of argu- 
ment." Gibbon's work has richly deserved its life of more 
than one hundred years, a period which I believe no other 
modern histoiy has endured. Niebuhr, in a course of lectures 
at Bonn, in 1829, said that Gibbon's "work will never be 
excelled." At the Gibbon Centenary Commemoration in Lon- 
don, in 1894, many distinguished men, among whom the church 
had a distinct representation, gathered together to pay honor 
to him who, in the words of Frederic Harrison, had written 
"the most perfect book that English prose (outside its fiction) 
possesses." Mommsen, prevented by age and work from being 
present, sent his tribute. "No one," he said, "would in the 
future be able to read the histoiy of the Roman Empire unless 
he read . . . Edward Gibbon." The Times, in a leader 
devoted to the subject, apparently expressed the general voice: 

Back to Gibbon is already, both here and among the scholars of Germany 
and France, the watchword of the younger historians. 

I have now set forth certain general propositions which, 
with time for adducing the evidence in detail, might, I think, 
be established: That in the consensus of learned people Thucy- 



54 AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 

dides and Tacitus stand at the head of historians, and that it 
is not alone their accuracy, love of truth, and impartiality 
which entitle them to this preeminence, since Gibbon and 
Gardiner among the moderns possess equally the same qual- 
ities. What is it. then, that makes these men supreme? In 
venturing a solution of this question, I confine myself ne< 
sarily to the English translations of the Greek and Latin 
authors. We have thus a common denominator of language, 
and need not take into account the unrivaled precision and 
terseness of the Greek and the force and clearness of the 
Latin. It seems to me that one special merit of Thucydides 
and Tacitus is their compressed narrative — that they have 
related so many events and put so much meaning in so few 
words. Our manner of writing history is really curious. The 
histories which cover long periods of time are brief; those 
which have to do with hut a few years are long. The works 
of Thucydides and Tacitus are not like our compendiums of 
history, which merely touch on great affairs, since want of 
space precludes any elaboration. Tacitus treats of a compara- 
tive^- short epoch, Thucydides of a much shorter one; both 
histories are brief. Thucydides and Macaula} T are examples 
of extremes. The Athenian tells the story of twenty-four 
years in one volume; the Englishman takes nearly five vol- 
umes of equal size for his account of seventeen years. But it 
is safe to say that Thucydides tells us as much that is worth 
knowing as Macaulay. One is concise, the other is not. It 
is impossible to paraphrase the fine parts of Thucydides, but 
Macaulay lends himself readily to such an exercise. The 
thought of the Athenian is so close that he has got rid of all 
redundancies of expression; hence the effort to reproduce his 
ideas in other words fails. The account of the plague in 
Athens has been studied and imitated, and every imitation 
falls short of the original not only in vividness but in brevity. 
It is the triumph of art that in this and in other splendid por- 
tions we wish more had been told. As the French say, "the 
secret of wearying is to say all," and this the Athenian thor- 
oughly understood. Between our compendiums, which tell 
too little, and our long general histories, which tell too much, 
are Thucydides and Tacitus. 

Again, it is a common opinion that our condensed histories 
lack life and movement. This is due in part to their being 



HISTORY. 55 

written generally from ;i study of secondhand, not original, 
materials. Those of the Athenian and the Roman arc mainly 
the original. 

I do not think, however, that we may infer that we have a 
much greater mass of materials, and thereby excuse our 
modern prolixity. In written documents, of course, we 
exceed the ancients, for we have been Hooded with these by 
the art of printing. Yet anyone who has investigated any 
period knows how the same facts are told over and over again 
in different ways by various writers; and if one can get be- 
yond the mass of verbiage and down to the really significant 
original material, what a simplitication of ideas there is, wh«t 
a lightening- of the load. I own that this process of reduc- 
tion is painful, and thereby our work is made more difficult 
than that of the ancients. An historian will adapt himself 
naturally to the age in which he lives, and Thucydidcs made 
use of the matter that was at his hand. ''Of the events of 
the war," he wrote, "I have not ventured to speak from any 
chance information, nor according to any notion of my own. 
I have described nothing but what I either saw myself or 
learned from others of whom I made the most careful and 
particular inquiry. The task was a laborious one, because 
eyewitnesses of the same occurrences gave different accounts 
of them, as they remembered or were interested in the actions 
of one side or the other." His materials, then, were what he 
saw and heard. His books and his manuscripts were living 
men. Our distinguished military historian, John 0. Ropes. 
whose untimely death we deplore, might have written his his- 
tory from the same sort of materials, for he was contemporary 
with our civil war and followed the daily events with intense 
interest. A brother of his was killed at Gettysburg, and he 
had many friends in the Army. He paid at least one memo- 
rable visit to Meade's headquarters in the field, and at the end 
of the war had a mass of memories and impressions of the 
great conflict. He never ceased his inquiries; he never lost a 
chance to get a particular account from those who took part in 
battles or campaigns, and before he began his Story of the Civil 
War he, too, could have said, "I made the most careful and par- 
ticular inquiry" of generals and officers on both sides and of 
men in civil office privy to the great transactions. I lis knowl- 
edge drawn from living lips was marvelous, and his conversa- 



56 AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 

don, when he poured this knowledge forth, often took the form 
of a flowing narrative in an animated style. While there are 
not, so far as I remember, any direct references in his two 
volumes to these memories or to memoranda of conversations 

which lie had with living actors after the close of the war 
drama, and while his main authority is the Official Records of 
the Union and ( Jonfederate Annies, which no one appreciated 
better than he were unique historical materials, nevertheless 
this personal knowledge trained his judgment and gave color 
to his narrative. 

It is pretty clear that Thucydides spent a large part of a 
life of about three score years and ten in gathering materials 
and writing his history. The mass of facts which he set down 
or stored away in his memory must have been enormous. He 
was a man of business, and had a home m Thrace as well as 
in Athens, traveling, probably, at fairly frequent intervals 
between the two places; but the main portion of the first forty 
years of his life was undoubtedly spent in Athens, when', 
during those glorious years of peace and the process of beau- 
tifying the city, he received the best education a man could get. 
To walk about the city and view the buildings and statues was 
both directly and insensibly a refining influence. As Thucy- 
dides himself, in the funeral oration of Pericles, said of the 
works which the Athenian saw around him, "the daily delight 
of them banishes gloom." There was the opportunity to talk 
with as good conversers as the world has ever known, and he 
undoubtedly saw much of the men who were making history. 
There was the great theater and the sublime poetry. In a 
word, the life of Thucydides was adapted to the gathering of 
a mass of historical materials of the best sort, and his daily 
walk, his reading, his intense thought gave him an intellec- 
tual grasp of the facts he has so ably handled. Of course he 
was a genius, and he wrote in an effective literary style, but 
seemingly his natural parts and acquired talents are directed 
to this: A digestion of his materials and a compression of his 
narrative without taking the vigor out of his story in a man- 
ner 1 believe to be without parallel. He devoted a life to 
writing a volume. His years after the peace was broken, his 
career as a general, his banishment and enforced residence in 
Thrace, his visit to the countries of the Peloponnesian allies 
with whom Athens was at war. all these gave him a signal 
opportunity to gather materials and to assimilate them in the 



HISTORY. 



57 



gathering. We may fancy him looking at an alleged fact on 
all sides and turning it over and over in his mind. We know 
that he must have meditated long on ideas, opinions, and 
events, and the result is a brief, pithy narrative. Tradition 
hath it that Demosthenes copied out this history eight times, 
or even learned it by heart. Chatham, urging the removal of 
the forces from Boston, had reason to refer to the history of 
Greece, and, that he might impress it upon the lords that he 
knew whereof he spoke, declared, "I have read Thucydides. "' 
Of Tacitus likewise is conciseness a well-known merit. 
Living in an age of books and libraries, he drew more from 
the written word than did Thucydides; and his method of 
working, . therefore, resembled more our own. These are 
common expressions of his: "It is related by most of the 
writers of those times;" I adopt the account "in which the 
authors are agreed;" this account "agrees with those of the 
other writers." Relating a case of recklessness of vice in 
Messalina, he acknowledges that it will appear fabulous, and 
asserts his truthfulness thus: 

But I would not dress up my narrative with fictions to give it an air of 
marvel, rather than relate what has been stated to me or written by my 
seniors. 

He also speaks of the authority of tradition, and tells what 
he remembers "to have heard from aged men." He will not 
paraphrase the eloquence of Seneca after he had his veins 
opened, because the very words of the philosopher had been 
published; but when, a little later, Flavius the tribune came to 
die, the historian gives this report of his defiance of Nero: 
"I hated you," the tribune said to the emperor; "nor had 
3 t ou a soldier more true to you while you deserved to be loved. 
I began to hate you from the time you showed yourself the 
impious murderer of your mother and j^our wife, a charioteer, 
a stage player, an incendiary." " I have given the very words," 
Tacitus adds, "because they were not, like those of Seneca, 
published, though the rough and vigorous sentiments of a 
soldier ought to be no less known." Everywhere we see in 
Tacitus, as in Thucydides, a dislike of superfluous detail, a 
closeness of thought, a compression of language. He was 
likewise a man of affairs, but his life work was his historical 
writings, which, had we all of them, would rill probably four 
moderate-sized octavo volumes. 



58 AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 

To sum up. then, Thucydides and Tacitus are superior to 
the historians who have written in our century, because by 
long reflection and studious method they have better digested 
their materials and cdmpressed their narrative. Unity in nar- 
ration has been adhered to more rigidly. They Stick closer to 
their subject. They are not allured into the fascinating bypaths 
of narration, which are so tempting to men who have accumu- 
lated a mass of facts, incidents, and opinions. One reason 
why Macaulay is so prolix is because he could not resist the 
temptation to treat events which had a picturesque side and 
which were suited to his literary style, so that, as John Morley 
says, "in many portions of his too elaborated history of Wil- 
liam III he describes a large number of events about which. 
I think, no sensible man can in the least care either how they 
happened, or whether, indeed, they happened at all or not." If 
I am right in my supposition that Thucydides and Tacitus had 
a mass of materials, they showed reserve and discretion in 
throwing a large part of them away, as not being necessary 
or important to the posterity for which they were writing. 
This could only be the result of a careful comparison of their 
materials and of long meditation on their relative value. I 
suspect that they cared little whether a set daily task was 
accomplished or not; for if 3^011 propose to write only one 
large volume or four moderate-sized volumes in a lifetime, 
art is not long nor is life too short. 

Another superiority of the classical historians, as I reckon, 
arose from the fact that they wrote what was practically con- 
temporaneous history. Herodotus was born 484 B. C, and 
the most important and accurate part of his history is the 
account of the Persian invasion which took place four years 
later. The case of Thucydides is more remarkable. Born 
in 471 B. C, he relates the events which happened between 
435 and 411, when he was between the ages of 36 and 60. 
Tacitus, born in 52 A. D., covered with his Annals and His- 
tory the years between 14 and 97. ** Herodotus and Thucyd 
ides belong to an age in which the historian draws from life 
and for life," writes Professor Jebb. It is manifestly easier 
to describe a life you know than one you must imagine, 
which is what you must do if you aim to relate events which 
took place before your own and your father's time. In many 
treatises which have been written demanding an extraordinary 



HISTORY. 59 

equipment for the historian, it is generally insisted that lie 
shall have a fine constructive imagination; for how can he 
recreate his historic period unless he live in it? In the same 
treatises it is asserted that contemporary history can not l>c 
written correctly, for impartiality in the treatment of events 
near at hand is impossible. Therefore the canon requires the 
quality of a great poet, and denies that there may be had the 
merit of a judge in a country where there are no great poets, 
but where candid judges abound. Does not the common rat- 
ing of Thucydides and Tacitus refute the dictum that history 
within the memory of men living can not be written truth- 
fully and fairly ? Given then the judicial mind, how much 
e.isier to write it. The rare quality of a poet's imagination is 
no longer necessary, for your boyhood recollections, }^our 
youthful experiences, your successes and failures of manhood, 
the grandfather's tales, the parent's recollections, the conver- 
sation in society — all these put you in vital touch with the 
life you seek to describe. These not only give color and fresh- 
ness to the vivifying of the facts you must find in the record, 
but they are in a way materials themselves, not strictly au- 
thentic, but of the kind that direct you in search and verifica- 
tion. Not only is no extraordinary ability required to write 
contemporary history, but the labor of the historian is light- 
ened, and Dryasdust is no longer his sole guide. The funeral 
oration of Pericles is pretty nearly what was actually spoken, 
or else it is the substance of the speech written out in the 
historian's own words. Its intenshty of feeling and the fitting 
of it so well into the situation indicate it to be a living con- 
temporaneous document, and at the same time it has that 
universal application which we note in so many speeches of 
Shakespeare. A few years after our civil war a lawyer in a 
city of the middle West, who had been selected to deliver the 
Decoration Day oration, came to a friend of his in despair 
because he could write nothing but the commonplaces about 
those who have died for the Union and for the freedom of a 
race which had been uttered many times before, and he asked 
for advice. "Take the funeral oration of Pericles for a 
model," was the reply. " Use his words where they will fit, 
and dress up the rest to suit our day." The orator was sur- 
p ised to find how much of the oration could be used bodily, 
and how mi -h with adaptation wa^ germane to his subject. 



60 AMERICAN msToKHAi, A.88O0IATIOW. 

But slight alterations are necessary t«> make the opening sen- 
tence this: 

Most of those who have spoken hen- have commended the lawgiver 
wlio added this oration to our other customs; it seemed to them a worthy 
thiuor that such an honor should be given to the dead who have fallen on 
the field of battle. 

In many places you may let the Bpeech run on with hardly 
a change. 

In the face of death [these men] resolved to rely upon themselves 
alone. And when the moment came they were minded to resist and 
surfer rather than to fly and save their lives. They ran away from the 
word of dishonor, but on the battlefield their feet stood fast; and while 
for a moment they were in the hands of fortune, at the height, not of ter- 
ror, but of glory, they passed away. Such was the end of these men: 
they were worthy of their country. 

Consider for a moment, as the work of a contemporary, the 
book which continues the account of the Sicilian expedition 
and ends with the disaster at Syracuse. "In the describing 
and reporting whereof, 1 ' Plutarch writes, "Thucydides hath 
gone beyond himself, both for variety and liveliness of nar- 
ration as also in choice and excellent words.*' "There is no 
prose composition in the world," wrote Macaulay. '"which I 
place so high as the seventh book of Thueydides. * * * 
I was delighted to find in Gray's letters, the other day, this 
query to Wharton: 'The retreat from Syracuse — is it or is it 
not the finest thing you ever read in your life?" In the 
Annals of Tacitus we have an account of part of the reign of 
Emperor Nero which is intense in its interest as the picture 
of a state of society that would be incredible did we not 
know that our guide was a truthful man. One rises from a 
perusal of this with the trite expression, "Truth is stranger 
than fiction;" and one need only- compare the account of Taci- 
tus with the romance Quo Vadis to be convinced that true 
history is more interesting than a novel. One of the most 
vivid impressions I ever had came after reading the story of 
Nero and Agrippina in Tacitus, from a view immediately 
thereafterward of the statue of Agrippina in the National 
Museum at Naples. 

It will be worth our while now to sum up what I think may 
be established with sufficient time and cure. Natural anility 
being presupposed, the qualities necessary for an historian are 



HISTORY. 61 

diligence, accuracy, love, of truth, impartiality, the thorough 

digestion of his materials by careful selection and long medi- 
tating, and the compression of his narrative into the smallesl 

compass consistent with the life of his story. He must also 
have a power of expression suitable for his purpose. All 
these qualities, we have seen, were possessed by Thueydides 
and Tacitus, and we have seen, furthermore, that by bringing 
to bear these endowments and acquirements upon contempo- 
rary histoiy their success has been greater than it would have 
been had they treated a more distant period. Applying these 
considerations to the writing of history in America, it would 
seem that all we have to gain in method, in order that when 
the genius appears he shall rival the great Greek and the 
great Roman, is thorough assimilation of materials and rigor- 
ous conciseness in relation. I admit that the two things we 
lack are difficult to get as our own. In the collection of ma- 
terials, in criticism and detailed analysis, in the study of cause 
and effect, in applying the principle of growth, of evolution 
we certainly surpass the ancients. But if we live in the age 
of Darwin we also live in an age of newspapers and maga- 
zines, when, as Lowell said, not only great events, but a vast 
"number of trivial incidents, are now recorded, and this dust 
of time gets in our eyes;" when distractions are manifold; 
when the desire to "see one's name in print" and make books 
takes possession of us all. When one has something like an 
original idea or a fresh combination of truisms, he obtains 
easily a hearing. The hearing once had, something of a suc- 
cess being made, the writer is urged by magazine editors and 
by publishers for more. The good side of this is apparent. 
It is certainly a wholesome indication that a demand exists 
for many serious books, but the evil is that one is pressed to 
publish his thoughts before he has them fully matured. The 
periods of fruitful meditation out of which emerged the 
works of Thueydides and Tacitus seem not to be a natural 
incident of our time. To change slightly the meaning of 
Lowell, "the bustle of our lives keeps breaking the thread of 
that attention which is the material of memory, till no one 
has patience to spin from it a continuous thread of thought." 
We have the defects of our qualities. Nevertheless, I am 
struck with the likeness between a common attribute of the 
Greeks and Matthew Arnold's characterization of the Amen- 



62 AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 

cans. Greek thought, it is said, goes straight to the mark, 

and penetrates like an arrow. The Americans, Arnold wrote, 
'think straight and .sec clear/' Greek life was adapted to 
meditation. American quickness and habit of taking the 
short cut to the goal make us averse to the patient and elabo- 
rate method of the ancients. We have improved, however, 
in manner of expression. The Fourth of July spread-eagle 
oration, not uncommon even in New England in former days, 
would now be listened to hardly anywhere without merriment. 
In a Lowell Institute lecture in 1855 Lowell said: 

In modern times the desire for startling expression is so strong that 
people hardly think a thought is good for anything unless it goes off with 
a, pop, like a ginger-beer cork. 

No one would thus characterize our present writing. Be- 
tween reserve in expression and reserve in thought there 
must be interaction. We may hope, therefore, that the trend 
in the one will become the trend in the other and that we may 
look for as great historians in the future as in the past. The 
Thucydides or Tacitus of the future will write his history 
from the original materials, knowing that there only will he 
find the living spirit, but he will have the helps of the modern 
world. He will have at his hand monographs of students 
whom the professors of history in our colleges are teaching 
with diligence and wisdom, and he will accept these aids with 
thankfulness in his laborious search. He will have grasped 
the generalizations and methods of physical science, but he 
must know to the bottom his Thucydides and Tacitus. He 
will recognize in Hornet and Shakespeare the great historians 
of human nature, and he will ever attempt, although feeling 
that failure is certain, to wrest from them their secret of 
narration, to acquire their art of portrayal of character. He 
must be a man of the world, but equally well a man of the 
Academy. If, like Thucydides and Tacitus, the American 
historian chooses the history of his own country as his field 
he ma}' infuse his patriotism into his narrative. For he has 
a goodly heritage. He will speak of the broad acres and 
their products, the splendid industrial development due to the 
capacity and energy of the captains of industry; but he will 
like to dwell longer on the universities, and colleges, on the 
great numbers seeking a higher education, on the morality of 
the people, their purity of life, their domestic happiness. 



HISTORY. 63 

He will never be weary of referring to Washington and Lin- 
coln, feeling that a country with such exemplars is indeed one 
to awaken envy, and he will not forget the brave souls who 
followed where they led. T like to think of the Decoration 
Day orator, speaking thirty years ago, with his mind full of 
the civil war and our Revolution, giving utterance to these 
noble words of Pericles: 

I would have you day by day fix your eyes upon the greatness of your 
country until you become filled with love of her; and when you are 
impressed by the spectacle of her glory, reflect that this empire has been 
acquired by men who knew their duty and had the courage to do it, who 
in the hour of conflict had the fear of dishonor always present to them, 
and who, if ever they failed in an enterprise, would not allow their virtues 
to be lost to their country, but freely gave their lives to her as the fairest 
offering which they could present at her feast. They received each one 
for himself a praise which grows not old, and the noblest of all sepulchers. 
For the whole earth is the sepulcher of illustrious men; not only are they 
commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in 
foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not 
on stone but in the hearts of men. 



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